There are a lot of things I find annoying in our world of today. But many of my top ten have to do with the Internet. I believe that somewhere, there is an entire room filled with techno-wizards who labor long hours to come up with aggravating tricks to force us to notice ads and, […]

Pete’s Pub is one of my favorite places. Back in the early 1950s, Pete’s father, Randolph Johnston, feared that the world was headed for ruin. So he loaded up his family and moved to Man of War Cay in the Bahamas. Here, he was able to buy a rundown sailboat that he and his family […]

In an earlier post, I related the experience of purchasing our new 55-foot Hatteras sportfish boat. It was a good boat, and we had many adventures in it—after we recovered from the shock of Bubba’s suicide. You can read about the incident in Chapter 39 “The (Second) New Boat” on my website: http://frankwilem.com. After the […]

While I’m an avid boater, I’m no sailor. It’s one of those things that I sort of inherently know about myself, yet still find the need to prove. My first experiences with sailing did little to change my gut-level feeling on this matter. Many years ago, a friend of mine invited my then-girlfriend and I […]

Being out on the water is always fun … well, most of the time. Along with the exhilaration of being in a boat and feeling free to go wherever you wish also comes the unexpected. A few years ago, my daughter, Brittany, won a qualifying event to fish the IGFA Junior Angler World Championship down […]

As we recently experienced first hand, it rains a lot on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. We average nearly six inches in May, alone. But in Phoenix, Arizona, they average a mere eight inches per year with only a tenth of an inch in May. So, a few years back, when I, my wife, Dee Dee, […]

I have travelled to Mexico a few times during my early years. So when Dee Dee proposed a trip to Cozumel, an island off the Caribbean coast of Mexico, I was all about it. I offered to book our flight to Cozumel, but she had other ideas. “No, I talked to this guy at work […]

In the past, I’ve written stories about the “Daddy-Daughter Dive Trips” Brittany and I take each year. Last August, we went lobster diving in the Keys. In the past we’ve dove the blue hole in Belize to 140 feet and even swam with a whale shark. Over the years, I’ve made hundreds of dives all […]

I wasn’t able to make a post last week because we were off playing. My daughter, Brittany, just turned 21, so we decided to take her on a cruise for her spring break from Florida (yes, I get the irony there). Among the places our cruise visited was Haiti. If you Google “travel to Haiti,” you will […]

I am not a golfer. I know that and have never pretended otherwise. One time I ran into a former neighbor of mine. He had lost some weight and was looking good, so I asked him what he’d been up to. “Golfing,” he replied. “Oh, I was never very good at that,” I told him. […]